PUBLISHED:April 27, 2011

Krawiec and Knight honored with Distinguished Chairs

Professors Kimberly D. Krawiec and Jack Knight have been honored with Distinguished Chair awards from Duke University. Duke President Richard Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange announced the honors on April 26.

The Distinguished Chair awards recognize Krawiec’s and Knight’s “achievements as scholars of the first rank,” Dean David F. Levi wrote in an announcement to the Duke Law community.

Krawiec will become the Kathrine Robinson Everett Professor of Law on July 1. A highly regarded scholar in corporate law and financial markets who joined the Duke Law faculty in 2009, her research interests span a variety of fields, including the empirical analysis of contract disputes; the choice of organizational form by professional service firms, including law firms; banned commercial exchanges; corporate compliance systems; insider trading; derivatives hedging practices; and "rogue" trading.

“In 2000, she wrote an article in the Oregon Law Review making an argument that was unusual for the time but now appears prescient,” said Brodhead in his citation, “that banks had an incentive to reward ‘rogue’ trading because the increased risk meant they would profit from this activity.” Krawiec’s recent scholarship addresses issues of diversity in the corporate boardroom and organizational misconduct and trade within forbidden or contested markets, including the competing forces at work, such as altruism and money, in the “baby market.”

At Duke Law, Krawiec teaches Business Associations, Financial Derivatives, Taboo Trades and Forbidden Exchanges, and Readings in Ethics.

Knight will become the Frederic Cleaveland Professor of Law and Political Science on July 1.

A leading figure in the study of democratic institutions who joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008, Knight studies modern social and political theory, law and legal theory, and political economy.

“It has been said that he bridges the worlds of the scholar of political philosophy and the theorist and practitioner of the law,” Brodhead noted. “His path-breaking research has studied the motivations and decisions of judges, how courts make decisions, and how judges choose their positions in opinions. He has also considered the effects of the norm of extensive prior judicial experience as a prerequisite for service on the U.S. Supreme Court. These considerations have rapidly become essential in legal scholarship.”

Knight holds a joint appointment with Duke Law School and Duke’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches in the Politics, Philosophy and Economics Program.